Don’t blame the victims

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What do you think Fred Phelps, the fringe preacher with the Westboro Baptist Church, would say about Alberta’s floods?

He’d say what he always says — that they are God’s punishment for Canada because of our tolerance for gays. Or, as his protest placards say, “God Hates Fags.” He’s the idiot who protests at funerals of U.S. soldiers. See, he even blames wars on gays.

Canada has our own versions of Fred Phelps. They say natural weather events, like seasonal floods, are “proof” that God Hates Oilsands. (They tend to say Mother Earth or Gaia.)

As TV images of Albertans evacuating their homes went global, these environmental extremists just couldn’t contain their glee — or their urge to blame the victims.

Former Greenpeace director Tzeporah Berman tweeted “there is a connection btw floods and the fact that dirty fossil fuels cause climate change.” She blamed the oilsands for the flood.

She also blamed the Conservatives. “There is a tragic irony in the conservative convention being cancelled due to climate change,” she wrote.

Paula Boutis, past president of the Sierra Club of Canada, chimed in too on Twitter. “Since the oil cos have caused the problem they should pay up.”

So she’s not just hung the floods around the neck of oil companies, she’s already thinking up a punishment for this natural disaster.

And of course David Suzuki wasn’t going to be left out, either. He published an essay titled “Is Alberta Flooding a Sign of Climate Change?” and then proceeding to suggest for several hundred words that it was.

Even international hucksters got in on it. Pavan Sukhdev, a former top UN environmental bureaucrat, blamed not only “oil” but “corporate profits” for Calgary’s flooding.

It’s morally repugnant to blame the victim. It’s even worse to do so for financial profit. And no one fundraises harder off human misery than environmentalists.

Their crackpot theory is wrong, just as Fred Phelps’ is. The oilsands emit just 6% of Canada’s CO2, and Canada all together emits just 2% of the world’s CO2, and all that is just a fraction of natural CO2 emissions. And then there’s the inconvenient fact that no global warming has been recorded since 1998. But hey, whatever raises money, right?

It would be laughable if it weren’t so nasty. Of course, the floods weren’t because of global warming or the droughts that supposedly follow. They were the opposite. There was more snow than average in the Rockies that was melting, and that happened to coincide with heavy rains. They created flash floods. It happens.

Calgary was flooded last weekend. But the Bow River last weekend carried about 10% less water than the great river flow of 1932 that flooded the same land.

The Elbow River was one third lower last weekend than it was back in 1879. And the river flow behind the Carseland dam was about 20% lower this year than back in 2005. The damage was greater this time for a variety of reasons — including that each year Calgary is more developed, so there’s more to damage. And now every puddle is recorded on a cellphone camera.

It is a tragedy. But it’s a natural tragedy. It has nothing to do with gays or the oilsands, no matter what the world’s hucksters have to say.